Cons

NoScript plug-in and other privacy features may be confusing to novice users.

Bottom Line

The Tor Browser makes the tricky work of surfing the Web anonymously as easy as using any other browser, but with a significant performance hit.

Jan. 25, 2016

Need to hire an assassin, buy some contraband, view illegal porn, or just bypass government, corporate, or identity thief snooping? Tor is your answer. Tor, which stands for "The Onion Router" is not a product, but a protocol that lets you hide your Web browsing as though it were obscured by the many layers of an onion. The most common way to view the so-called Dark Web that comprises Tor sites is by using the Tor Browser, a modded version of Mozilla Firefox. Using this Web browser also hides your location, IP address, and other identifying data from regular websites. Accessing Tor has long been beyond the ability of the average user. Tor Browser manages to simplify the process of protecting your identity online—but at the price of performance.

What Is Tor?If you're thinking that Tor comes from a sketchy group of hackers, know that its core technology was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and D.A.R.P.A.. The Tor Project non-profit receives sizeable donations from various federal entities such as The National Science Foundation. The Tor Project has a page listing many examples of legitimate types of Tor users, such as political dissidents in countries with tight control over the Internet and individuals concerned about personal privacy.

Tor won't encrypt your data—for that, you'll need a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Instead, Tor routes your Internet traffic through a series of intermediary nodes. This makes it very difficult for government snoops or aggressive advertisers to track you online. Using Tor affords far more privacy than other browsers' private (or Incognito) modes, since it obscures your IP address so that you can't be tracked with it. Standard browsers' private browsing modes discard your cached pages and browsing history after your browsing session. Even Firefox's new, enhanced private browsing mode doesn't hide your identifiable IP address from the sites you visit, though it does prevent them tracking you based on cookies.

Starting Up

Connecting to the Tor network entails more than just installing a browser and firing up websites. You need to install support code, but luckily, the free Tor Browser bundle streamlines the process. Installers are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Tor Project recommends installing the browser on a USB drive for more anonymity and portability; the drive needs to have 80MB free space.

We tested a standard Windows installer, with choices to create desktop icons and run the browser immediately. The browser itself is a heavily modified version of Firefox 38.5 (as of this writing), and includes several security plug-ins as well as security tweaks such as not caching any website data. For a full rundown of the PCMag Editors' Choice browser's many features, read our full review of Firefox.

Before merrily browsing along anonymously, you need to inform Tor about your Web connection. If your Internet connection is censored, you configure one way, if not, you can connect directly to the network. Since we live in a free society and work for benevolent corporate overlords, we connected directly for testing. After connecting to the Tor relay system (a dialog with a progress bar appears at this stage), the browser launches, and you see the Tor project's page.

Interface

The browser's home page includes a plea for financial support to the project, a search box using the anonymized Disconnect.me search, and a Test Tor Network Settings link. Hitting the latter loads a page that indicates whether you're successfully anonymized. We recommend taking this step. The page even shows your apparent IP address—apparent because it's by no means your actual IP address. We verified this by opening Microsoft Edge and checking our actual IP address on Web search sites. The two addresses couldn't have been more different, because the Tor Browser reports the IP address of a Tor node.

The browser interface is identical with Firefox, except with some necessary add-ons installed. NoScript, a commonly used Firefox add-on, is preinstalled and can be used to block most non-HTML content on the Web. The green onion button to the left of the address bar is the Torbutton add-on. It lets you see your Tor network settings, but also the circuit you're using: Our circuit started in Germany and passed through two different addresses in the Netherlands before reaching the good old Internet. If that doesn't suit you, you can request a new circuit, either for the current session or for the current site. This was one of our favorite features.

One thing we really like about the Tor Browser is how it makes existing security and privacy tools easier to use. NoScript, for example, can be a harsh mistress, who can be difficult to configure, and can break websites. But a security panel in the Torbutton presents you with a simple security slide. At the lowest, default setting, all browser features are enabled. At the highest setting, all JavaScript and even some image types are blocked, among other settings. This makes it easy to raise or lower the level of protection you need, without having to muck around in multiple settings windows.

Everything you do in the browser is tested for anonymity: When we tried full-screening the browser window, a message told us that that could provide sites a way to track us, and recommended leaving the window at the default size. And the project's site specifically states that using Tor alone doesn't guarantee anonymity, but rather that you have to abide by safe browsing guidelines: don't use BitTorrent, don't install additional browser add-ons, don't open documents or media while online. The recommendation to only visit secure HTTPS sites is optionally enforced by a plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere.

Even if you follow these recommendations, though, someone could detect the simple fact that you're using Tor, unless you set it up to use a Tor bridge relay. Those are not listed in the Tor directory, so hackers (and governments) would have more trouble finding them.

About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services (pretty much the progenitor of Web 2.0) for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine’s Solutions section, which in those days covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered Web 2.0 and other software for ExtremeTech.com.

Michael got his start in computing as a lad, when he wrote a BASIC program for a Radio Shack … See Full Bio